75 West End Road

In 1891, the socialite Laura Brevoort Sedgwick James built one of the first houses on the Georgica Dunes, a shingle-style summer residence designed by Joseph Greenleaf Thorp. Thorp was the society architect of the early East Hampton summer colony, and his most famous commission stands a short walk down this same street: Grey Gardens, at 3 West End Road. A windmill tower was added in 1899 and still rises over the rooflines today, which makes West End Road something rare, a single stretch of dune where you can read the whole arc of the resort's founding architecture in two houses by one hand.

The estate has changed hands only three times since. The first transfer came in 1935, when Juan Trippe, the founder of Pan American World Airways, bought the property and expanded it into a family compound. The Trippes held it for five decades, and the house accumulated its share of aviation lore along the way; Compass's own history of the property repeats the story that Trippe used to land his seaplane on Georgica Pond.

In 1987 Calvin and Kelly Klein bought the estate from the Trippe family, and it became the designer's Hamptons retreat for thirty-four years. Klein brought in Thierry Despont to refine the interiors, and Kelly Klein continued to live there after the couple's 2006 divorce. Then, in May 2021, the compound traded quietly off market to a pair of Delaware entities named Traumhaus 1 and Traumhaus 2. Traumhaus is German for dream house. The buyer behind the LLCs has never been publicly identified.

Whoever they are, they did not flip it. The new owners commissioned a three-year restoration, completed in 2024, led by Soledad Mendez of Bellwether Architects with interiors by the Paris-based designer Tristan Auer. The project reads less like a renovation than a thesis on how to modernize a Thorp house without sanding off its age.

The details carry the history forward deliberately. A fireplace is clad in metal worked like an airplane wing, an homage to Trippe's five decades on the property. A glass catwalk now crosses the double-height living room. The floors are reclaimed pine stained ebony, and outside, Hollander Design reworked the grounds around a red clay tennis court set into the dune landscape.

The main house runs 8,865 square feet, with seven bedrooms and eight baths organized around that double-height living room at the center. The scale is generous but the register is restrained, closer to Klein-era minimalism layered over Gilded Age bones than to the usual Hamptons trophy finish.

Down at the water, the listing makes a claim worth repeating even with attribution: it describes the property's boathouse as the last working boathouse on Georgica Pond. On a pond ringed by some of the most protective land-use rules on the East End, that is the kind of grandfathered artifact no amount of new construction can reproduce.

The geography is the argument. The compound spans just over eight acres across two parcels, running from more than 500 feet of Atlantic beachfront on one side to Georgica Pond on the other, with the house and windmill tower set on the dune line between them. A separate 1.89-acre oceanfront parcel, acquired alongside the main estate in 2021, is independently buildable; the listing describes plans in place for a guest cottage and pool there.

Three transfers in 135 years, from the Sedgwicks to the Trippes to the Kleins, is its own kind of record for this street. Now the estate has returned to market for the first time in its history as a public listing, with an ask that, if met, would reset the benchmark for a Hamptons sale. The last time it traded, nobody even got to see it.

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